Gemini Links 16/03/2024: gplaces in Flathub and the Scroll Protocol
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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🔤SpellBinding — ACFHMST Wordo: FARER
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Frames Of Reference- Chapter 10
I’m sitting at my usual booth in the Carl’s Jr., away from the prying eyes of the strangers who stop in off the Interstate, downing the usual- egg protein slithers down my throat, reinforcing my muscles. I consider how these calories are going to affect me. Can’t overthink trivial details like that. Not today. Check my watch. 8:03 A.M.
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Frames Of Reference- Chapter 11
Horrible dream. As with all the bad ones, you feel as if you’ve had it before.
Verwus stands tall and gaunt like an emperor skeleton over a table of implements, jagged metal which flashes in some kind of strobe display, mist is circling around him, clouds of smoke rise from the floor, his arms are outstretched toward his sides and he’s breathing heavily, you can feel the unhinged mania raining off him.
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Frames Of Reference- Chapter 12
I’m looking at her face again, even if my focus should be on the road. Even so, I know the drone of the engine and the soft purple hum of the overhead light will get me drowsy. I need some visual ephemera to pace myself. Before us, the streaks of resilient yellow paint designating the meridian flash past like pages in a flipbook, unremarkable reminders of the nation’s infrastructure, the Corps of Engineers, Roosevelt’s New Deal, troops of men out here to paint the landscape with their brash obsidian serpent, which they subsequently named Highway 50.
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Technology and Free Software
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gplaces in Flathub
I'm not exactly sure what I think about Flatpak and Flathub.
On the one hand, packaging and package maintenance is a huge burden for distro developers. The dominance of systemd, Wayland, GNOME and Electron pushes for isomorphism (in the sociological sense) and distros today are not as different as they used to be. This means, lots of effort is wasted, especially when all the distros that ship a certain application place it under /usr, don't carry any patches, use glibc, and so on. A reliable cross-distro package manager makes life easier for both developers and users.
But, on the other hand, the Flatpak SDK is essentially 80% of a separate distro, stuffed in a chroot environment: it's huge, and the responsibility (and authority) to push security and stability fixes is more centralized than ever. In some sense, this "vendor-neutral distro" is a single point of failure. In addition, Flatpak supports what many consider to be erosion of free software UI, through CSD, per-application GTK+ themes, etc'. Flatpak brings applications closer to the lowest common denominator among distros, and that means the SDK contains older libraries, uses the default GTK+ theme, and so on.
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Improved gplaces Flatpak
Gemini doesn't have strong presence on Flathub and I hoped to see more variety there after my submission of gplaces: at the time, Flathub offered only one or two Gemini clients. Although it's not exactly the ideal platform for distribution of minimalistic software, it's still a good way to reach more people (on more distros) and spread the message. I finally found the time to improve the gplaces Flatpak, and I hope this would improve the user experience for Gemini newcomers that discover it through Flathub and gplaces.
First, the Flatpak runtime is (finally) bumepd from 22.08 to 23.08. If I'm not mistaken, 23.08 is more common these days, and you're more likely to have it already if you use Flatpak. gplaces is a very odd creature in Flatpak land: the gplaces executable is about 100K, but it can pull many MBs of runtime if it's the only Flatpak on your system that uses 22.08.
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Software Releases/Announcements
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Announcing the Scroll Protocol [Ed: Microsofter trying to replace Gemini and Gopher+]
I want to announce a new project I am working on, called the Scroll Protocol.
The Scroll Protocol is a new document-retrieval protocol on port 5699, inspired by Gemini and Gopher+. One of its primary focuses is on quality-of-life additions, particularly internationalization. It adds more metadata to responses, the ability to request pages in a specific language, and a new metadata/abstract request, similar to Gopher+'s metadata request. It tries to offer a power-to-weight balance by providing basic metadata and relational data in documents with minimal effort and additions.
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Programming
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Looping backwards
If you have C-style for loops, here's a nice variant: "i starts from n and goes to zero."
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.